Today we are delighted to release another freebie for our design community. There are many free icon sets out there, and there are quite many commercial ones as well. Yet a good, consistently designed icon set is always a welcome addition to any designer’s toolbox. Oliver Twardowski1 had released the Ultimate Free Web Designer’s Icon Set2 (750 icons, including PSD sources) in the past, and this time he has prepared a fresh, new icon set which contains over 250 original high quality PNGs. Please notice that some icons may be similar to the ones released in the previous set.

Download the Collection for Free!

The elements contained in this collection are free for personal and commercial use. Please link to this article if you want to spread the word or give it a tweet or share it on Facebook! You may modify the file as you wish but please do not redistribute them elsewhere without written permission from Smashing Magazine and Oliver Twardowski.

Behind the Design

As always, here are some insights from the designer:

“This set was started out in January 2011, so the whole design process took me nearly a year to finish. Including all the tiny, little, shy transparent PNGs and keys, the set is build out of 145.728 pixels. All icons were made with love in Cologne, Germany.

If you think that some icons are missing in this set, feel free to share your thoughts and ideas in the comments section below, contact me at aroma[at]addictedtocoffee[dot]de or find me via twitter at @mywayhome. Oh and did I mention: I’m always available for exciting freelance projects :)

Stay tuned! You never know — there might be a second part of the set coming out quite soon!”

Thank you, Oliver Twardowski. We appreciate your work and your good intentions!

The Smashing team loves high-quality content and cares about the little details. Through our online articles, Smashing Books, eBooks as well as Smashing Conferences, we are committed to stimulating creativity and strengthening the web design community’s creative forces.

ferso

This is always a problem when you tell truth. We are living in the world of lies, everybody wants to hear it. I agree, most of those icons looks like from win98 era, but not all, there are also nice icons.

Mark

Mundstrøm

I think they’re pretty good all in all. Hey, they’re not ugly! That’s a matter of taste. But I’d certainly consider the context if I were to use them. They’re colorful and “toy-like” so they’re probably not good for minimalistic, corporate designs.

The thing that’s really… really… really incredibly hard to do with icon sets, is to make the “style” consistent from end to end and that’s where they come up short. I can’t describe it without using terms like visual weight, color intensity, lighting, outlines and bevels. The biggest issue is the inconsistent perspective (the viewing angle).

Also – Try to keep the concept consistent – Decide if you’re going to use visual metaphors or actual illustrations of what the icons represent? Sometimes an icon represents an action, sometimes an object, sometimes a term.

Vitaly Friedman (editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine)

bogdan

It’s funny to see people immediately jumping on the backs of users leaving negative comments about this. It seems the Smashing community has resigned itself to a collective orgasm of any freebie that is posted on the website, and thinking any different is considered a capital sin.

Freebies are nice and the work should, of course, be appreciated, but this will still have to pass through the filter of utility and aesthetics. And surely an objective designer will see how this set falls short on both accounts. Fine, so aesthetics may be a question of taste and style, but an icon set that has more representations of fizzy pop cans than files (actions) is hardly handy. They are flat, they are bluntly contoured, and their gimmicky colourful nature might make them usable in some contexts (very few), but only if they were provided in a reasonable size.

Geo

Sue

Thank you, Oliver. I really appreciate the effort put in to create these and I will certainly be using them.

I will also say that I’m appalled by the pathetic anonymous (typical of the interwebs) snarking by the NON-contributors with their smug & *edgy* criticism of a GIFT. Get your hand out of your pants, people and perhaps try and create something yourself. Or not.

0

26

bogdan

How are the negative opinions anonymous exactly? Would I have to leave my full name and address for my comment to qualify as a relevant post? Gifts aren’t excluded of criticism just because they are free. The author isn’t a primary school pupil to be fed constant positivity for the fear of his self esteem being affected.

It’s called having an “opinion”. Look it up, you might find the concept groundbreaking.

7

27

Andre

Alex Juel

I think these icons are great, Oliver. I especially love the Campbells soup can :D

Also, interesting timing on this because a designer friend of mine just released a free icon set of her own today, if anyone wants check it out – designfiles.net/design/phases-design-studio-introduces-uplinks-icon-set/

-8

29

Laura

Nice icons, but both this set and the previous one of 750 icons are missing something I’d consider pretty basic: a good old-fashioned, universally-understood telephone! (Most icons of a cellphone are too easy to mistake for something else.) You might be consoled by the fact that that I’ve yet to find an icon set that includes all the icons I’m looking for – something that includes both social media icons, as well as those for different ways to contact us (in person, email, phone, chat, and by appointment.) Thanks for your work!

Andik

Marlou

Thank you for making and sharing these icons. I might use some of them, but I don’t think they work very well as a complete set.

For instance, the keys look like a completely different set, I don’t understand why they are part of the same download.
The rest of the icons also look like different sets put together. The post-its and the folders look very lite and clean, the chip and facebook look very colorful and crisp, the control buttons look very harsh and some of the icons look just completely off, like the speach bubbles and concierge bell. I’m not an icondesigner myself, but I think you should try keeping iconsets in the same contrast. Going for lite and clean? Make them all that style. Going for clean pixel lines all around? Make all of them like that. But that’s just my opinion!

2

36

Mundstrøm

OK, I’ve been thinking more about how to explain what I mean. I hope you’re finding this constructive instead of critical -) I think we need more icon designers so please be encouraged to improve :) Things are a mix of being viewed:

1) Straight on (2D)
• The coke can
• The CD

2) At an angle (3D)
• Book icons
• Toilet roll

3) Orthographic (no depth in perspective)
• Book icons
• Toilet Roll

4) With depth perspective
• Folders
• Wooden crate and boxes

I’m a bit of a cheat – I design my icons in a 3D app, then I can adjust viewing angle, lens perspective, lighting etc. as needed. However, it requires a LOT more work. I try to build up a collection of objects to reuse and build my icons almost like virtual lego.

4

37

Marcel

What was the idea behind this set, exactly? I’m currently involved in making web-based software for the healthcare, financial and education industries. You have an icon for an address book, which is nice if our users want to send messages. But you have no icon that displays an e-mail message, a send-icon, a cancel icon or even a new-message icon, for example.

Furthermore, software tends to have users. You don’t have a user-icon, let alone an icon for adding, removing or editing – whether that be users, posts, other types of records or anything else.

You do supply a search icon and a settings icon. Both often found in web-apps. Then again, you also supply icons for toilet paper, coke, html5, hamburgers and Smashing Magazine’s book.

I can’t seem to find any particular use for this set. Any particular use I might use these icons for would immediately disqualify this set as a viable icon set because it’s incomplete for any specific purpose.

Ask yourself this: Who would ever use a coke icon and hamburger icon in their software, and also go: “I’m so glad there’s a rainbow icon in here, too!”

adumpaul

Nice article.Web Fly Software is one of the best web development and web design company in India,webflysoftware are committed to deliver high standard and affordable web solutions involving an advanced approach together with years of experience and expertise.

Peter

Raine

I like these, thank you Oliver. These have a bit of a ‘retro’ 8-bit feel to them (may be it’s just me), which is very nice.
I would love to see a smartphone icon though, or something that has a distinct “I’m a mobile phone” connotation. Would be very useful in a lot of cases.

Thanks again, Great job!

1

52

Julianne Bueno

Gordon

I’m still looking for a real replacement for the famfamfam iconset, but whilst it’s definitely showing its age it does have a huge variety of icons. I’d love to see an iconset that is an updated version of famfamfam or a superset (Includes updated versions of all the icons plus ones that aren’t in the original famfamfam set).

Michael

yuifreelance

d3vlab

That’s A LOT of hard work. You did a great Job Oliver. I could see using these in some fun themes. Sometimes its about what the client wants, NOT what you like. I’m searching for some icons now for a client. Hard to find some set styles and I can’t always do the work myself. Thanks again Oliver and Smashing Mag for giving your work to the community.

0

63

Justin St. Germain

I think Simmm is crazy. Oliver, you did an amazing job. This shall be useful in the future for myself and not worrying about spending a ton of time making icons for a site. Thanks for your hard work and dedication.

SmashingConf isn't the eighth wonder of the world, but we are pretty close. Join us at SmashingConf Oxford on March 16–19 or meet us at the shores of Santa Monica for SmashingConf LA on April 27–30. You won't be disappointed.